Police talk to mourners at the Nyungar camp after Robert Bropho died. Photograph: Cortlan Bennett/AAP

The last remnants of the Swan Valley Nyungah camp have been demolished.

The camp was closed by the West Australian government more than a decade ago after allegations of widespread sexual and substance abuse.

Bulldozers moved into the camp near Lockridge on Tuesday morning, flattening the derelict buildings that used to house the Indigenous families who had claimed, via the federal court, that the closure was contrary to the Racial Discrimination Act.

The WA planning department said the land would be resurrected as a place of Indigenous cultural significance, including a ceremonial area, a memory wall and story trails.

Duncan Ord, acting director-general of the department, said the buildings had been extensively vandalised and were uninhabitable.

“Extensive consultation with Aboriginal groups, representatives and the wider community has been undertaken ... and there is overwhelming support for returning the former campsite to its natural state,” said Ord.

But Swan Valley elder Bella Bropho said the demolition was a “desecration”.

“The government is intensively trying to destroy the last visible vestiges of what was a thriving community,” she said.

“The government actions are just one more example of the desecration of sacred land and the complete disregard that all governments hold for the first people’s law, culture and religion.”

National attention was focused on the camp in 1999 when 15-year-old Susan Taylor killed herself in the reserve.

The subsequent inquest accepted evidence that rape and sexual abuse of minors at the camp was widespread, that sexually transmitted diseases were higher than with non-Aboriginal children and that drug taking was a major problem.

Former camp elder Robert Bropho, who during his trial compared himself to Martin Luther King and Gandhi, was originally jailed for 12 months for indecently assaulting a 13-year-old girl at the Swan Valley reserve in 2006.

He was then jailed for six years after the WA district court convicted him of five counts of unlawful carnal knowledge of a girl under 13 years between 1990 and 1991.

He died while serving the sentence.

Bella Bropho, his daughter, said she still would not accept her father was guilty, and said WA’s child protection authorities were culpable for Taylor’s death.

“It was a political attack on him – and in the eyes of the family we don’t see that [guilt],” she said.

“And the trouble with Susan was none of her case workers understood her, and she had a history of suicidal thoughts.”

Mounted police are at the camp monitoring protesters, who marched on parliament last week.